The house sat at the edge of the bayou like a skeleton submerged just beneath still water—half hidden by cypress knees and fog that hung thick as smoke. On the first morning of October, the light filtered through a silver haze, shaping the trees into blurred specters. Ruby arrived here because she had nowhere else to be, and no one left to mind the hours.
She had moved from the city, lured by the promise of quiet, an old inheritance from an uncle who passed without leaving much besides this weathered frame and the slow rot of its secrets. The wood creaked beneath her feet as she crossed the porch, the boards warped and slick with moss. The air was damp and smelled faintly of earth and decay, sweet and biting at once.
Inside, dust motes hung in the beams of the morning sun, drifting like tiny, slow-falling stars. Ruby unpacked a box of books, running her fingers softly over yellowed pages, then sat at the window, watching the thick fog clutch the water. She wanted to believe this was a sanctuary, but the house settled uneasily around her, groaning low and exhaling cold breaths through unseen cracks in the walls.
Days bleeded into one another, marked only by the moon’s slow crawl and the calls of the marsh. At night, the weight of silence deepened. Sometimes she thought she heard tapping—a gentle, rhythmic knock at the back door. When she pulled it open, there was nothing but the bayou’s mirror-surface, still and dark, rippling faintly beneath a weeping moon.
Every evening, a slow, chilling draft would stir the kitchen curtains, and the smell of burnt wood would curl from the fireplace, even when she hadn’t lit a match. The air grew thick then, charged with something she couldn’t name—a pull like a heartbeat just beneath her ribs, slow, pulsing, relentless.
One night, she followed it.
Drawn down the narrow stairwell to the basement door, which she had kept shut since she arrived. The key fit, heavy and cold, turning reluctantly in the old lock. Darkness spilled out, thick and suffocating. She fumbled for the flashlight and switched it on, the cone of light slicing through shadows crowded with cobwebs and dust. The damp air felt sour against her skin.
Near the far wall, a set of faint scratches traced uneven lines in the plaster. Ruby knelt to inspect the marks: they were too precise to be random damage, and beneath them, she found faintly carved words. She traced the letters with her finger, lips moving silently: *“Find the hollow light.”*
Her breath hitched, and the beam of the flashlight trembled in her hand. Hollow light. She had no idea what that meant.
The next day she wandered the property, searching. The bayou’s edge was tangled and wild; branches dipped down like pointed fingers into the sluggish water. The fog thinned a little in the afternoon sun, and Ruby found herself staring over the water, caught in something deep and ancient. The reflection was off—her face was there, but twisted, drawn out and fading, as if someone underneath mirrored her movements but with delay, like a cruel mimicry.
Her skin prickled with unease. She blinked, and the face was gone.
That night, sleep was a twisted, half-remembered dream where voices spoke in the twilight beneath the house. They whispered over and over, a susurrus threading through the floorboards, something maddening and fragmented. “Hollow… hollow light…”
Ruby awoke to a light that spilled sideways through the cracked doorway of the basement. An unnatural glow that throbbed like a pulse—too steady to be moonlight, too cold to be anything natural. She wrapped a shawl tight, edging down the stairs.
The glow radiated from a cavity in the foundation—an opening shaped like a doorway but no door, just a black void swallowing the light of her flashlight. She hesitated, every muscle screaming not to look inside. But the pull overwhelmed her.
Inside, the air was frozen cold and impossibly sharp, like breathing shards of glass. The hollow light was a faint, internal radiance, faint as the inside of a seashell, tinted dull blue. She could see nothing beyond—but felt something watching, waiting in the darkness.
Then, a voice. Not spoken aloud but inside her mind, whispering softly:
“Come find me.”
She cried out and ran back up, the basement door slamming shut behind her. For weeks, Ruby fought the compulsion to return, but the whispers never stopped—always distant, always patient.
One night, she relented.
Returning to the basement, the hollow light welcomed her like a breathless secret. She stepped closer, and the light pulsed, spreading in a circle that seemed to pulse against the walls and the ceiling—an orb of cold radiance that grew until it enveloped her vision.
Suddenly, the basement was gone.
She was standing in the woods outside the house, but nothing looked familiar: the trees were twisted, blackened at the roots, and the fog clung thickly between their trunks. The sky was an impossible shade of muted violet, stilled as if waiting. Ruby’s breath fogged in the air, but when she tried to speak, no sound came.
Movement caught her eye—a figure, distant and flickering like static on an old television screen. It stepped forward, its form wavering between clarity and shadow. As it drew closer, she saw her own face, mirrored but hollowed, eyes black pools devoid of life.
A hand reached out—her own hand—cold and delicate as cracked porcelain.
The figure whispered, voice layered with hers and something else, something waitingly patient:
“This is the hollow light. It is the place between your life and something… else. You came because you need it, because the world you knew was never meant to hold you.”
Ruby tried to step back, but the ground beneath her feet seemed to dissolve into nothingness. The figure’s eyes bored into hers, pulling at a thread somewhere within her mind.
“The house was never a home. It was a beacon—a trap resting on the edge of your mind, stitched with your uncle’s unspoken madness, waiting for the one who could hear the whisper in the dark. You came alive here but you’re already dead, Ruby. The hollow light breathes between the moments. It waits to pull you under so it can live.”
The air twisted, and the walls of the impossible forest began to close in, sucked into a spiral of shadow. Ruby felt herself unraveling, split between the world she left and the void pressing in.
Then a crack—sharp, splintering—
She opened her eyes.
The basement was silent. Dawn filtered thinly through the cracks in the boarded window, casting faint lines of orange dust motes in the still air. The hollow light was gone.
Ruby staggered out of the basement into sunlight she had not realized was so real until then. She knew that leaving the house was no longer a question. The hollow light would always exist inside her, a whisper beneath her skin like a second breath—and it was waiting.
But she refused to look back.
She packed one box, careful now to leave the last word behind, scratched into the basement wall in fading black:
*“Find the hollow light.”*
And as she locked the door, the house sighed, settling deeper into the bayou, waiting for the next quiet soul to wander close enough to hear its secret call.
